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Where to find all WinPE drivers for almost all HP Servers in one location?

As a part of my daily life I build deployment solutions for customers that supports both Server OS and for Client OS and one of the components need are drivers for WinPE. Normally not a problem on the client side, but for servers there are some things that could let you grow a bit more gray hair then needed.

32bit drivers for 64bit OS

Since I prefer to have only one single boot image I would like to have the 32 bit version since that handles both 32 and 64 bit OS images. There is no obvious way to find the 32 bit versions of the driver in the 64 bit edition of Windows Server webpage. When deploying using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager you need the 64 bit drivers and you might want to use the HP Insight Control for System Center instead

Specialized WinPE drivers might be needed

Even if WinPE is a subset of Windows it should be able to use the normal drivers, but “should” is just a word. In many cases the dual bus architecture or other “inventions” might require monolithic drivers. Those drivers should not be used in the running OS, only in WinPE

The solution (if you have a HP Server)

HP have something called Scripting Toolkit and that just happens to contain all the drivers needed for storage and network for all ML/DL/BL HP ProLiant DL/ML/SL 300, 500, 700, 900 and HP ProLiant BL server series and HP ProLiant 100 G6 series and higher which basically covers “all” server from HP. The current version is 8.70 for x86 and can be downloaded and the x64bit version here

When you extract the archive into a folder it will look like this

Guess where the drivers are…

Getting the drivers in the correct location

For MDT 2012 Update 1

This is pretty straight forward. Open deployment workbench and add the drivers to the WinPEx86 folder (if you do not have one, you should create that)

Modify so that all drivers from that folder is imported into the boot image

For Windows Deployment Services for Windows Server 2012

Not that hard either, remember we only need these drivers for WinPE, not for the running OS so when we import them we need to flag them so that will never be installed, we just need to have them imported so that we can apply them to the WinPE image, it should look like this

The offline method:

The online method:

drvload.exe <path>

For System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager:

Note: For System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager you can also download the HP Insight Control for System Center, that contains HP server drivers for network and storage, however, those are only 64 bit drivers. So for the SCVMM solution you can either download the scripting toolkit driver pack, but for SCVMM they need to be x64 bit drivers or you can download the HP Insight Control for System Center kit that is only x64 bit version. It will basically be the same driver, the HP Insight Control for System Center has one part that is rather nice, it has an installer that will install all the drivers and then tag them during the import so that you can use tags when injecting them into WinPE